I am Edin Dzeko’s biggest advocate. I like him as a player and I feel that he brings a lot to our team – but I can’t help but feel that he and his role as a player are badly misunderstood by various sections of City fans, so I’m here to fight his corner.
We’ve become so used to busy-bodies in the form of Sergio Aguero and previously Carlos Tevez, that we seem to fail to appreciate a classic centre-forward anymore. You’re never, like it or not, going to have a player chasing down every last ball or battling like a dog for loose balls in a player like Edin Dzeko. You can argue that he should and that he’s just bone-idle or lazy but personally I feel that’s just not his game.
For me, Dzeko works best deployed as the focal point in a partnership up-front, there he can receive a ball to feet and release the likes of Aguero and co. to feed him in more central positions in the final third. Take our 5-1 demolition of Spurs at White Heart Lane in our first title-winning season back in 2011, a game in which the Bosnian scored 4 goals and in which his partnership with Argentine Sergio Aguero worked perfectly and proved far too much for Younes Kaboul and Michael Dawson at the back.
Bar last season, the 29-year-old averages around 20 goals a campaign in all competitions for us; no mean feat for someone many City fans claim is a ‘liability’. Having scored 50 Premier League goals in 130 appearances for City, it’s the big goals that have impressed me with the man they call a ”Diamond” in his homeland.
In our 2013/14 title success, Edin Dzeko was vital in the difficult period we faced at the end of the season, in which we battled it out with Liverpool in hope of securing the Premier League trophy. He scored a colossal brace at Goodison Park in our annual bogey fixture against Everton, opened the scoring at the notoriously tricky Selhurst Park and broke the deadlock in City’s huge clash against Aston Villa at home in our penultimate game of the season. Goals of such magnitude speak for themselves in terms of a players contribution.
Last year the ex-Wolfsburg striker only managed 4 league goals and many have been critical of this poor return, but I feel that Dzeko has an alibi here. The Bosnian faced long periods of the season injured or frozen out of the first team due to Pellegrini’s preference to play with a lone striker in Sergio Aguero. He managed only two full 90 minutes over the whole season and was subbed off a further 10 times during the course of the campaign, so never really had the chance to fully get it going. Wilfried Bony’s introduction in February only further served to keep him sidelined as everyone at the club was eager to find out what their new signing had in stall for them.
Taking a constructive view of Dzeko’s predicament for next season, you can only hope that Wilfried Bony provides healthy competition for City’s number 10 and that both get their fair share of game time. Rumours of a potential exit from Manchester for Serie A have persisted over the recent days, yet his agent Irfan Redzepagic told the Bosnian press otherwise: “Edin has a contract with Man City until 2018 and is happy at the club … so the chances of him leaving are none.”
When I look at Edin Dzeko, I see someone who has been an excellent servant to our club, someone who has scored some massively important goals for us and someone who has won a number of trophies in his time in Manchester – we shouldn’t forget this as a fan-base and should appreciate what he has brought and will bring in the future for Manchester City.
